This might belong in some circlejerk sub, but I think it’s somewhat clever. Basically, if AI datacenters get shut down, the power that would’ve been used to generate AI slop could be used for magnificent things. I mean, it’s purely clean energy because instead of using gas or oil, you take energy that COULD be used for something useless and put it to better use. Think of all the applications.
- We could power countless electric cars, trains, and bikes.
- We could power countless medical devices like pacemakers and defibrillators.
- We could power countless lights in people’s homes.
All this could be accomplished by not building massive datacenters. What’s more is that there could be countless gallons of clean drinking water used for surgical cleaning and chemistry that would otherwise serve to cool the amount of datacenter power. Think of all the possibilities!
If only Sam Altman could understand this…!
I would add that the tax should only be applied to AI prompts that actually get sent to some datacenter, just because it would be unreasonable to track self hosted models (and might also encourage companies to get all that AI shit they are shoving down our throats to run locally).
The concern is that AI data centres use far too much electricity. A joule is a joule regardless of whether it is consumed in a building with the Amazon logo on it, or in a server room located in a former janitor’s closet in a company’s offices.
Hell, even a 0.1¢ tax would be effective.
I think this could be elegantly solved by saying that (1) anyone who controls the computer system which executes a prompt for a large language model or image generator is liable to pay a tax of one-tenth cent per prompt, and (2) any organisation or person who would pay less than [$/€]100 a year in this tax is exempt from paying. This means anyone can use their own computing resources to run up to 100,000 tax-free prompts, so hobbyists and organisations that have AI but use it only sparingly as needed would not pay any tax, but any organisation which either spams AI or lets users spam AI would be taxed quite heavily. Besides, those people are already charged retail rates for electricity so they are already penalised in the form of high power bills if they waste electricity on AI nonsense.
Google handles 5 trillion searches per year, so if they want to provide every single user with an AI summary then they would need to cough up $5 billion a year in AI tax, which is a ludicrous amount. That would single-handedly fund the US green energy transition If they actually did that. A solar panel on every roof and a wind turbine in every garden. If users really want to use the AI then Google can charge them for it, maybe by requiring that they subscribe to their Google One thing or something. Either way, fewer people choose to use AI, Google profits from those that do, less misinformation from AI hallucinations, and less energy wasted on garbage AI prompting. Everyone wins.